How else do you explain a script that raises the hopes of a reborn NHL city to within a few wins of their first Stanley Cup Final in more than two decades of trying, then dashes them?

And the dream isn’t dashed by just any team, but one in its first season in the league.

And just to pour a little more salt into the wound, a Winnipeg native and son of one of the city’s all-time football greats, a man who hasn’t scored a playoff goal in three years, scores the winner in the deciding game – right in downtown Winnipeg.

The Vegas Golden Knights and Willard Reaves’ kid, Ryan, will play for the Stanley Cup, after Sunday’s 2-1 win clinched their Western Conference Final in a startling five games.

The Winnipeg Jets, with all their firepower – Patrik Laine had more goals this season than Reaves has in his entire, eight-year NHL career – are done.

“Pretty empty. Emotionless,” is how Jets captain Blake Wheeler described the feeling, 10 minutes after the final horn signalled the end.

The picture 10 minutes earlier was worth another 1,000 words, at least.

Wheeler and Mark Scheifele down on one knee, Bryan Little leaning on his stick like Ken Dryden used to, Paul Stastny bent over at the waist – all exhausted and empty.

“Physically, emotionally – you just gave your all,” Stastny said of the moment. “It just wasn’t meant to be.”

Perhaps youth caught up to the Jets, players like Laine, Nik Ehlers and Kyle Connor unable to make the impact on the scoresheet they had up to this point.

Of course, vets like Little, Adam Lowry and Mathieu Perreault will lament the same thing.

Perhaps inexperience with the moment contributed, particularly in a dreadful start that spotted Vegas, playing with nothing to lose, the dreaded first goal, yet again.

“Nerves, it seemed like,” Stastny said of the opening 10 minutes, in which his team moved more like tanks than Jets. “Playoff jitters.”

Something snapped them out of it, though, and they began buzzing, tying it late in that first period.

But the sticks went silent, after that.

And this time it wasn’t Vegas goalie Marc-Andre Fleury stealing the show.

Inexplicably, the Jets’ big push never came.

“Throughout this whole thing until that buzzer blew, I never thought we were out of it,” Wheeler said. “It just seemed like every time we grabbed some momentum, they took it. You have to give them a ton of credit for doing that. It’s the sign of a good team.”

What are the Jets, then?

All that effort, all that talent – and just six goals to show for it over their last four games, combined.

Scoring was never this hard during the season, or during the first two rounds of the playoffs.

But the Jets’ hands failed them in this series, either a half-second too slow with the shot, or the pass, or a whiff altogether – with a Golden Knight usually in their face a half-second later.

“We had to grind and work and work for the chances that we did get,” head coach Paul Maurice said. “There’s a cost to that. And it stacked up, coming off of what we did to get here.”

Maurice had tried to shake some goals from the tree by making three lineup changes, including two on his blue line, but to no avail.

The depth scoring that made the Jets so dangerous from October through mid-May dried up.

“You’re not scoring, you’re not winning,” Perreault said, one goal in nine playoff games something that’ll stick in his craw over the summer. “It’s hard to believe it’s all over. We really thought we were going to do it this year. We had that great feeling. We felt like we had the team to do it.

“We tried so hard, too. We left it all out there. It’s so disappointing when you put so much effort into it and the result’s just not there. It’s hard to swallow.”

So was the winning goal by Reaves, basically a linebacker on skates who hadn’t scored a playoff goal in three years.

“Hearing the boos after I scored was probably my favourite moment of this series,” Reaves said. “It’s been a little weird. I have a couple cousins that came in Jets jerseys, a best friend came in a white T-shirt. So they’re going to hear about that.”

Jets goalie Connor Hellebuyck couldn’t believe the double-deflection went where it did, any more than he could believe the series went the way it did.

“I didn’t see much,” Hellebuyck said of the shot. “But any time a guy tips it and it goes bar-south, you know something’s going right for them. Luck was on their side, definitely. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

With any luck, the Jets will be back in this position before too long.

This Week's Flyers

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